The sincerest form of flattery

Copying is everywhere in nature and
in human life, and although a
general free-for-all isn’t perhaps the
answer, a re-examination of what
restrictions on copying can realistically
mean is urgently needed

By Bradley Winterton / Contributing Reporter

In Praise Of Copying

In many Asian countries, perhaps all, imitation products are available wherever you look. Whether it’s fake Louis Vuitton handbags (of which Taiwan is cited in this book as having five different grades, some more expensive than the originals), Gucci shirts or Adidas running shoes, pirated Harry Potter books, DVDs or CDs, all are more or less openly on sale on every hand.

At first glance, and to some extent in the final analysis too if Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying is to be believed, this is not altogether a bad thing. The rich nations, whose creations it is that are almost invariably being copied, may howl in protest, and demand promises to clean up the infamous trade at high-level intergovernmental meetings, but at street level, especially where there are tourists in evidence, things carry on to almost everyone’s satisfaction. The tourists are delighted by the low prices, the traders are making good money, and the police are pocketing their bribes and looking the other way. Once a month everyone shuts up shop for 10 minutes while the authorities slowly pace the streets, then write reports saying they’ve seen no counterfeit goods being sold in their area, reports that are then presumably forwarded to the Western nations as proof that the Asian governments’ anti-piracy measures are indeed taking effect.

Meanwhile, copyright warnings are prominently displayed even on the duplicated goods themselves (“violations will be prosecuted according to the civil law and the penal code”). But what copyright precisely is, and who decides who it is that has the exclusive right to make copies, is one of the many questions this book attempts to answer.

Publication Notes

In Praise Of Copying

By Marcus Boon

285 pages

Harvard

Marcus Boon teaches at Toronto’s York University and has been running a course on copies and copying for several years. The general drift of his book is that copying is everywhere in nature and in human life, and that whereas a general free-for-all isn’t perhaps the answer, a re-examination of what restrictions on copying can realistically mean in the modern world, especially the modern digital world, is urgently needed.

He’s amusing on the problem academics have these days discerning which of their students’ essays are copied from online sources, which craftily adapted from them, and which wholly original. But even here he defends the inveterate copiers, arguing that like good forgers they must have paid close attention to their originals, which can’t be a bad thing. He also relates the difficulties he’s encountered when assembling term course packs, including as they do photocopied materials about which universities have complex rules that are often hard to comply with.

But it’s the computer world that presents the greatest problems, and offers the greatest possibilities. In a culture of downloads, file-sharing and networks that, even after the demise of Napster nearly a decade ago, still offers ever-increasing opportunities for duplication, and not only in music, control is very hard. And more and more things become possible as the years pass.

Boon doesn’t leave a stone unturned when examining the phenomenon of copying in general. He considers Plato’s concept of mimesis, and his bizarre idea that all things are imperfect copies of celestial ideals. (Would Plato really argue for a divine version of a Louis Vuitton handbag? Boon sees a Buddhist as very sensibly asking). He then goes on to look at montages, Shakespeare’s liberties with earlier texts and plots, the fact that 17th-century painters had studios where assistants painted parts of every painting even though the finished product would be attributed to “Rembrandt,” Gandhi’s dream of spinning-wheels for all to bypass industrial duplication, and modern Chinese “Buddha machines” with their tiny speakers and endlessly reduplicated mantras.